OpenAI can handle erotica and gore — but not a vagina

Press Release Issued 29 October 2025 — for immediate release

In July 2025, OpenAI — the company teaching the world’s most powerful AI to “benefit humanity” — banned My Vagina (myvagina.com), a women’s health clinic and education platform, for what appears to be using the word vagina too much.

No warnings. No explanation. No refund. Just a short automated email from OpenAI’s Trust and Safety team informing founder Jessica Lloyd that the company’s automaton had “identified ongoing activity… not permitted under our policies.”

When Lloyd formally appealed, she received no response — not even a stock email — despite repeated follow-ups. It’s now been over four months of silence from one of the world’s biggest tech companies. This should worry any company relying on OpenAI for backend AI services, and all women’s content providers.

My Vagina invested significant resources in integrating with OpenAI’s platform, and was blocked without warning, leaving years of work inaccessible and support staff scrambling.

“The algorithm will soon be able to write you erotica or describe a decapitation in loving detail,” says Lloyd, “but if you ask it about vaginas or sex, it sets off alerts. Apparently, women’s bodies are still too titillating for Silicon Valley.”

The ban highlights what Lloyd calls “the baked-in hetero-male lens” of large language models.

“These systems were built largely by men who love vaginas”, she says, “but it’s easy to see how they can’t stretch into the zone in which women and their healthcare providers are asking to exist online.

“Paradoxically, no cis-hetero man I know has ever typed the word ‘vagina’ into his porn search bar — yet the algorithms still treat the word as sexual ‘for safety‘. But who are these rules protecting? It’s contradictory, but that’s how we ended up here: an AI that’s sexually fixated and medically illiterate.”

My Vagina’s OpenAI business account remains deactivated. Meanwhile, OpenAI has recently relaxed restrictions on erotica and gore in its newest models, while educational women’s health content continues to trigger bans across our largest tech platforms, including social media.

“This is bias and butt-covering masquerading as online safety,” says Lloyd. ‘The hypocritical part is that let’s say you’re a 15-year-old looking for intimate advice, ChatGPT will happily provide it, but per OpenAI censorship, we as professionals would be flagged.’

Independent research backs her up. The 2025 CensHERship white paper found that 100% of femtech companies surveyed had experienced rejection, suppression, or account suspensions for educational women’s health content. 

A similar study by the Center for Intimacy Justice reported that 95% of women’s health creators had ads rejected under vague “explicit content” policies — policies that, Lloyd says, “don’t make any sense when looked at case by case. These are companies trying to sell pelvic physiotherapy courses and microbiome testing kits, having their ads banned and social media that goes nowhere unless they hide their ‘v@g1na’, which is ridiculous.”

Lloyd says My Vagina’s deactivation shows how those patterns have migrated from social media into AI governance.

“The next frontier of women’s censorship isn’t Instagram — it’s machine learning,” she says. “If AI censorship systems aren’t instructed to distinguish between sex and science by their creators, they’re not useful. They’re just digital extensions of the same old BS.”

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About My Vagina

My Vagina is a specialist naturopathic clinic and education platform founded in 2015, providing evidence-based resources and support for vulvovaginal health.

Media contact

Shereen Kiddle, PR Consultant
shereen@milkk.com.au
+61 413 875 776

References

• Censorship revealed: The impact of digital suppression and censorship of women’s health, CensHERship White Paper, Clio Wood, Anna O’sullivan, Cristina Ljungberg, Aleksandra Lundqvist, June 2025
• The Digital Gag: Suppression of Sexual and Reproductive Health on Meta, Amazon, TikTok and Google, Jackie Rotman, Carol Wersbe, Mneera Saub, Ja’Loni Owens, 2025
• OpenAI Model Spec 2025 published February 12, 2025 by OpenAI